


A Mother Protects

by impudent_strumpet



Series: In The Shadows [1]
Category: Plague Tale: Innocence (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, And I'm paying dearly for it, Angst and Feels, At least this has Melie, Blood Loss, Blood and Gore, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Brother Feels, Brother-Sister Relationships, Brotherly Love, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Crying, Dark, During Canon, Emotional, Emotional Hurt, Escape, Family, Family Feels, Family Issues, Fear, Graphic Description, Hallucinations, Hearing Voices, Heavy Angst, Hugs, Hurt, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Mid-Canon, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, My darkest fic ever, No Fluff, Nobody likes non-shippy fics huh, One Shot, Other, Parent-Child Relationship, Parenthood, Poor Beatrice, Prison, Sad, Sibling Love, Siblings, Tears, This is brief though, Torture, Twins, Violence, holy shiz, just a little, oh well, really graphic, really really dark, sanity slippage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-18 01:29:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19966489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impudent_strumpet/pseuds/impudent_strumpet
Summary: She protec. She attac. But most importantly...she wants her kids bac. With a little twist at the end.





	A Mother Protects

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I actually went and made that the summary. This is REALLY graphic, I'm gonna warn you. My first explicit fic, actually. Amicia's not the only one having guilt-trip hallucinations :(
> 
> Drawing by me!

Strips of her skin had been flayed off her arms and legs and back. She was dirtied, bruised, and bleeding almost everywhere. The floor of the Bastion beneath her, where she was questioned, was stained with blood and littered with other pieces of its victims, who seemed no more than empty shells of people, no more life in them at all. It was dark all around apart from the small beams of light the torches gave off, a place cut off from the rest of the world. All of this and the hardened, stony faces that glared at her seemed to blur together.  
  
Béatrice de Rune was sure she was in Hell.  
  
"Just answer this one thing, and I will let you go free," came the deep, harsh voice of that man in the helm with the cross, whose face she had never seen. "Where are your children? _Where is the Carrier?_ "  
  
The children she had to shut the back gate in front of to protect them from this same man and offer herself up in sacrifice, even as her poor daughter had pounded desperately on the gate and pleaded for her mother.  
  
"I...won't...tell," she gasped. It was practically a mantra now, right behind her lips each time.  
  
But still, even after countless times, the pain felt as new as if she was first feeling it, her cries echoing off the walls of the Bastion, as she felt another lash, another flaying, another rack or crank, ever so slow and cruel. Her muscles and joints screamed, her blood flowed out, agony seemed to penetrate her every pore. She screamed until all breath from her lungs was gone without a trace.  
  
When she was sent back to her dank, filthy cell for the night, she would at first sprawl over the floor within the light of the torch and sigh in relief, even as she heard the cacophony and frantic scurrying of those rats that seemed to be all around...only to face more terrors to come. Her wounds were rotting, she knew it, there was this stinking green and taupe fluid seeping from them, worms and roaches crawling out of the stripes on her back, out of the gashes all over her body, out of her eyes, beneath her skin. She could not feel them at times but she could see them, clear as day, and she just _knew_ they were there. When she looked up she saw transparent faces, fading in and out, that seemed at once strange and familiar. Frightening, ghostly creatures crawled out of the walls towards her only to disappear when she shrieked and turned away. She heard strange sounds and muffled voices jumbled together, seemingly both within and without.  
  
She was exhausted beyond belief from all of this, yet sleep never seemed to find her. Or perhaps it did at times. She could scarcely tell anymore.  
  
In spite of what she would expect, the unmistakable voices of her children in these times brought her no comfort. They seemed to be the worst, even.  
  
_"Mummy? Mummy, why did you leave us?"_ her little boy asked her sadly.  
  
_So you could be safe..._ But the words seemed to come apart and fall away as she insisted them.  
  
_"But I do need you! I need you!"_ The desperate parting words of her sweet girl echoed around her and seemed to cut right through her heart. _"MOTHER, NO!"_  
  
_"Mummy, you said I can't go outside...why am I out here?"_ came Hugo's voice as that awful piercing rang through his head.  
  
_Just breathe, Hugo..._  
  
_"What is happening? What is wrong with him...?"_ The voice of her sheltered Amicia, whose innocence she had taken every step to protect, trembled with distress.  
  
_It will be alright, Amicia..._  
  
But they could not hear her. No matter how she strained, she could never reach them. And that seemed to deplete her of all hope and resolve.  
  
In the cell beside her, looking at her with deep sympathy in his eyes, Béatrice saw a young man with fiery red hair, in what looked like peasant clothing, but every prisoner appeared about the same here after a while.  
  
Wait. Good gracious, he was barely even a man. He was just a boy, he looked right around Amicia's age.  
  
_Amicia..._  
  
Béatrice started to cry, yet again, as her daughter's face came to her mind unbidden. _It's alright,_ she told herself. _She is with Laurentius. She and Hugo are safe._ She tried, so hard, to tell herself this every day.  
  
But hadn't she seen Amicia die?  
  
When they were making their way through the gardens, an Inquisition guard was pacing by, so they could not pass unseen and unheard, as Hugo was slower than his mother and sister and would give them away. Amicia had suggested that she could cross and make a diversion, then Béatrice and Hugo could follow.  
  
"Alone?" Béatrice had asked, unable to keep her voice from shaking at the thought of how risky that was.  
  
"Yes. You'd have more time..." Amicia had said.  
  
"Be very careful..." she had whispered, keeping a watchful eye on her firstborn as she carried out the plan.  
  
But the guard had caught her and struck her down, and though it would give her and Hugo away, an anguished "My daughter, no!" had flown forth from Béatrice's lips.  
  
That sight had been more terrible than all the torture.  
  
No. It couldn't have happened. She had led Amicia and Hugo out the back gate, shutting it behind them and letting Lord Nicholas take her instead. That was why she was here. She was being racked and flayed and beaten and scarred, but they were alive.  
  
They were her one and only strength here, when it all felt unbearable, when she felt like a broken shell or passing shadow of what she had once been. Like a precious heirloom, like one of those protective amulets she had given to each of her beloved children, she could hold close to herself the knowledge that she had done everything to keep them both safe. Because of her they would live.  
  
She had seemingly long ago lost track of the passing of time. Had she been here days, weeks, months, years? She barely ever even saw the sun in here. But some days, maybe weeks, later she heard a set of strange footsteps coming toward her cell. They were very faint ones, almost as if the passerby was barefoot.  
  
Then the person walked past her cell, to the one just next to her that held the redheaded boy inside. His visitor was a girl, crouching just slightly, like she, Amicia, and Hugo had done to stay hidden as they had escaped the Inquisition's raid of the estate. The girl looked so very like the boy in the cell they could have been twins. She wore a similar black headband around her brow like his, along with a blue scarf around her neck that covered part of her face, and she had red hair in a short ponytail that glinted copper in the torchlight. She wore a dirty-looking brown tunic and pants with some patches in them, fingerless gloves that reached halfway up her forearms, a belt with a coil of rope in it, and a small bag slung around her shoulder. And, as Béatrice had suspected, she was barefoot.  
  
"Mélie!" the boy in the cell exclaimed, leaning forward toward the bars.  
  
"Shhh!" the girl named Mélie hissed, holding a finger to where her lips were beneath her scarf as she knelt in front of the bars. "For God's sake, brother, do you want to get us killed?!"  
  
She was fiddling with something in her hands before raising them to the keyhole of the cell that held her brother, causing a few dull clicking sounds.  
  
_Was she picking the lock?_  
  
She was indeed. After those few sounds, the door swung open and she stood as her brother rushed out to embrace her, and her arms came tightly around him in turn for a few moments. This was by far the most tender and beautiful thing Béatrice had ever seen in the Bastion. So much it made her heart ache.  
  
But it was also fleeting, as it had to be.  
  
"Come _on_ now, we can't be caught!" Mélie urged her brother as they started to slip away.  
  
"Mélie, you'll never believe this," the boy enthused.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Did you see that woman in the cell next to me?"  
  
"No. Why?"  
  
"I heard her name while I was there. Béatrice de Rune."  
  
"...Wait... _de Rune?_ "  
  
"That's right. She's the mother of those siblings we rescued. We have to tell them she's alive!"  
  
_Wait, what?_ Béatrice lost the other snippets of the red-haired siblings' conversation as they became further away and as she struggled to comprehend what she had just heard. _Those siblings we rescued_ , they had said... What had her children to do with those two? When had they been rescued, and from what?  
  
But she could not bring herself to think of Amicia and Hugo being in danger, even as those barbarous monsters called Inquisitors were after them. It was more than she could bear. She _had_ to believe they were safe with Laurentius. Tears fell from her eyes again and her hands trembled. She was not sure what was worse, the bodily torture she endured so many times or this terrible _unknowingness_ of her own children's safety. It seemed they were alright now, given how the brother and sister had spoken of them...but what about tomorrow, or even an hour from now?  
  
Béatrice lowered her face into her palms to muffle her sobs.  
  
This seemed to be one of those times, that happened in the Bastion, that she was not strong enough to kneel. So she could only lay on the floor of her cell and pray from there that the Father above would watch over her dear children and protect them...as here and now, their own mother could not. Perhaps, Béatrice thought, that fact was the most horrible of all.  
  
_A mother protects her children, doesn't she?_

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaaand this is inconsistent with "Postlude," where Béatrice asks Amicia who Melie is, but oh well ^^;
> 
> The dialogue from when Béatrice thinks she saw Amicia die IS CANON; in Chapter 1, if Amicia is attacked and killed by a guard and Béatrice sees, she's like "My daughter, no!" and it's kind of heartbreaking :( But yeah, I went and broke the fourth wall a little there ^^;  
> I found this out when going through playthroughs of the game looking for how each character reacts to Amicia dying or almost dying. Béatrice's ("My daughter, no!") and Rodric's ("You swines! AMICIA!"...even if it's the rats attacking Amicia XD) are the most unique, whereas everyone else is like "AMICIA NOOOOOO D:" Although I thought Mélie's was really sweet and sad; when you're sneaking through the flowers with her out of her hideout, if Amicia gets caught and attacked, she lets out a distressed-sounding "No, please! AMICIA!" <3
> 
> And just that part where Arthur comes back to Château d'Ombrage with Mélie got me thinking, what if Béatrice overheard them and was like "wait what, what do these two have to do with my kids" XD


End file.
